Desk Note🎙️| They Can't Let Anything Just Be About American Pride

What the Olympics revealed about the left's relationship with America

Here’s what I noticed this week, watching the Olympics online: when something is supposed to be unifying — purely, apolitically American — you can learn a lot about a person by whether they can just let it be that.

And what I’ve seen from a significant corner of the left this week tells me something that I don’t think they intended to reveal.

Let me start with Eileen Gu, because she is the opening act for all of this.

Eileen Gu is 22 years old. She grew up in San Francisco. Her mother is Chinese, came to the United States in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s to study, and raised Eileen essentially on her own. Eileen went back and forth to Beijing throughout her childhood, yes — but she is American. She speaks with a California valley girl accent thick enough to sunburn. She was admitted to Stanford University, one of the most elite institutions in this country.

And at 22, after a lifetime of benefiting from every freedom, every opportunity, every open door that being raised in the United States provides, she chose to compete in freestyle skiing for China.

She says it’s to honor her mother’s roots. And I’ll allow for that. That’s her stated reason, and I’m not going to take it from her completely. But there are questions that don’t get asked enough in polite company. China does not recognize dual citizenship. China does not allow athletes to compete for them unless they are Chinese citizens. And there is no public record of Eileen Gu renouncing her American citizenship. Which means, most likely, China made an exception, almost certainly tied to the millions of dollars the CCP reportedly paid her to represent them. An adversarial nation. Paid. To wave their flag instead of ours.

Now I know how that sounds. And the first thing people will say is that critics are just envious, that she’s beautiful and smart, and people can’t stand it. No. The criticism comes from patriotism. It comes from a very basic, uncomplicated love of country, and from noticing the profound irony of someone who was given everything by the United States, educated at the highest levels, and then chose to represent the nation, most actively working against American interests on the global stage.